Nate Silver, second from left, with other panelists of the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics annual conference on March 1, 2013, in Boston. / L. Barry Hetherington, AP

by Rem Rieder, USA TODAY

by Rem Rieder, USA TODAY

In a lengthy "manifesto" accompanying the launch Monday of his reconstituted and much-ballyhooed FiveThirtyEight site under the aegis of ESPN, numbers guy to the stars Nate Silver makes a promise: He won't be breaking much news.

If you're looking for the latest development, or commentary on the latest development, FiveThirtyEight.com won't be your go-to destination.

And that's a good thing.

One of the many attractions of the Internet era is the immediacy it makes possible. When something happens, no matter where, we know about it right away. We're quickly awash in information, in interpretation, in takes. And that can be very satisfying, and exciting.

But speed is the enemy of accuracy. And in the rush to get the news out right away that characterizes the current media ecosystem, it's easy to get things wrong. I'm not just thinking of rumors running rampant on Twitter. With each megastory, it seems we have mainstream news outlets making mega errors. The Newtown school massacre, the Boston marathon bombing, the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard shootings are just a few examples. And the same pitfalls await instant pontification.

Now, the rush to publish is not going away anytime soon. That genie is so out of the bottle. And there is nothing inherently wrong with it: People want to know. It's just that the stakes have been raised enormously, given how quickly news can be disseminated and the brutal competition to attract readers. And the fact that interest in a story often peaks in the early stages.

That doesn't mean that news outlets can't and don't do both: break the news and also put it in context, explain it, make sense of it. But at times it does mean an excruciating balancing test before pulling the trigger. The pressure to move quickly is powerful, and can eat up a lot of firepower and bandwidth.

That's why it's crucial to have some venues with the luxury of staying above the fray.

So what's the new FiveThirtyEight like? Well, we can tell the new data journalism bastion is going to be an eclectic mix.

When FiveThirtyEight was under the umbrella of The New York Times, Silver became a star with his dead-on political predictions. But he got his start as a baseball metrics guy. So it's no shock that on site's opening day, at least, there was plenty of politics and sports in the stew. Witness the headlines: "Many Signs Pointed to Crimea Independence Vote - But Polls Didn't" and "All Politics Is Presidential," juxtaposed with "Baseball's Most Surprising Seasons, Good and Bad" and "Wichita State's Strength of Schedule Isn't the Problem." Plus there is a big March Madness interactive.

A piece on how much Romeo and Juliet talked to each other in the Shakespeare play compared with how much they talked to others almost bordered on data geek self-parody. We know FiveThirtyEight will be all about the data, but really?

On the other hand, a piece on the internal debate at the new site about whether to say "data is" or "data are" was absolutely charming. (FiveThirtyEight opted for the former.)

Despite its very high-minded tone, FiveThirtyEight does exist in today's digital journalism world. And so we had "Toilet Seat Covers: To Use or Not to Use" and "You Just Had Sex, So How Many Calories Did Your Burn?," which sound straight out BuzzFeed.

It's often hard to get a sense from a debut of the ultimate personality and strength of a new venture, and FiveThirtyEight is no exception. It's clearly a work in progress. The site had problems loading in the early going, leading it to tweet: "We're live! But there's a 70.617854% chance you'll be able to see."

Many publications mark their debut with a blockbuster cover story. Witness Newsweek, which returned to print earlier this month with a piece purporting to ID the founder of Bitcoin that came under heavy fire but nevertheless created no shortage of buzz. FiveThirtyEight went a very different route. By far the dominant offering is the Silver treatise explaining what FiveThirtyEight will be all about. While carrying self-seriousness to new heights, it's also quite interesting.

In addition to engaging in lots of abstract theorizing, Silver says that the staff's 20 ("and counting") journalists will focus on politics, economics, science, life and sports. FiveThirtyEight's logo is a fox, and Silver 's opening salvo is called "What the Fox Knows." Turns out that this is a reference to the saying, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

This gem, Silver writes, is the handiwork of the Greek poet Archilochus.